Pinterest Fail: Postmortems on craft disasters

“I loved the idea of making a swing from recycled jeans," the post read. Clearly, some things are better left unmade. Click here to see the original inspiration.

“I loved the idea of making a swing from recycled jeans," the post read. Clearly, some things are better left unmade. Click here to see the original inspiration.

Photo: Pinterestfail.com

Photo: Pinterestfail.com

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“I loved the idea of making a swing from recycled jeans," the post read. Clearly, some things are better left unmade. Click here to see the original inspiration.

“I loved the idea of making a swing from recycled jeans," the post read. Clearly, some things are better left unmade. Click here to see the original inspiration.

Photo: Pinterestfail.com

Pinterest Fail: Postmortems on craft disasters

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The ombre glitter nails seemed easy enough.

At home in Menlo Park with just an example from photo-sharing site Pinterest for inspiration, 28-year-old Jenna Andersen applied the base layer of polish with ease - but then she started adding glitter and everything got more complicated.

By the end, her pinky was covered in sparkles from top to bottom. One index finger had a line of silver down the middle. A thumb had just a sparkling glob on the side.

"On Pinterest, everything looks so easy - like how could you mess up ombre glitter nails?" Andersen said. "But you really can."

The polish barely dry, Andersen started a blog: Pinterest Fail ( www.pinterestfail.com). Though launched with all her own failures, Andersen now curates half a dozen submissions daily, showcasing do-it-yourself projects that looked great online but, in reality, have gone horribly awry.

Commenters offer condolences or advice to each submission. Sometimes the original crafter (the one who posted the lush Etsy image or Pinterest success) chimes in to point out missed steps. Part catharsis, part troubleshooting, part schadenfreude, Pinterest Fail, which launched 12 months ago, gets around 800,000 page views a month.

"Pinterest is this site of unrealized dreams," Andersen said. "There are these women we admire so much, who seem like none of their projects ever fail, and I just knew it couldn't be true. We only see like the perfect cake pops, but there were some bad cake pops too, and maybe you can't even make those cake pops."

For Andersen, it matters that projects be feasible - "serious crafters today will almost always search Pinterest before Google and definitely before books."

Pinterest Fail (and similar sites like CraftFail and Pintrosity.com) exist in part because crafting projects have gotten so elaborate, Andersen said.

Tougher than Martha

"There's this idea that Martha Stewart was very conservative and demanding of women's time, and we should be doing something a little wilder and more fun - but often those are even harder! And with really vague instructions!"

She points to a website called Not Martha that included a recipe for a comically elaborate Leprechaun Trap Cake.

A Bundt cake with a rainbow of colored layers inside, it has frosting that looks like grass, chocolate coins perched in the middle on pretzel bars (the trap), and a pretzel ladder leaning against the side.

"This woman created Not Martha to say 'I'm not Martha Stewart, I don't have to create something perfect' - but look at the trap cake! You couldn't have a more complicated project. The majority of the time you try something from Martha, it works."

Over at the crafting stalwart Martha Stewart Media, they are not surprised by the popularity of Pinterest Fail.

Tried and true crafts

"Pinterest allows this interest in crafting to bubble up, but it's hard to make something truly replicable," said Marcie McGoldrick, vice president and editorial director of holiday and crafts for Martha Stewart. "What millennials really want is something tried and true. They want to put their own modern twist, but they want a base of authenticity."

McGoldrick recently saw an image on Pinterest of a swing made out of a pair of jeans.

"I mean! You need to know the weight of those jeans, which grommets to use. Glue is not always glue. It's in the generalities where Pinterest Fail is born."

When Bonnie Brewer, who runs the Pin Junkie blog, tried to replicate a drink called the Dirty Girl Scout, she switched white creme de menthe for green creme de menthe (her husband bought it accidentally). The result was "putrid" and "gross." She submitted it to Pinterest Fail as a warning against substitutions.

"There's a lot of things I probably wouldn't have done without Pinterest," said Brewer. "And yes you have a few mistakes - at Thanksgiving I made a pumpkin pie with tofu - not everything turns out. But I've started to publish those too, and it feels great to share."

Some bloggers don't like to see their recipes tried and posted as "fails," Andersen said.

"An interesting aspect of the site is that some of the bloggers feel a little bit sad or offended. Sometimes people will write in, respond a little frustrated like, 'This project works, you did it wrong.' "

Fixing the problem

Burlingame native Dorothy Kern, who keeps the blog Crazy for Crust, was one of those. A friend alerted her that an attempt at making her 45-minute dinner rolls had been posted as a fail.

"Obviously you don't want to be on Pinterest Fail! It's a disaster!" Kern said. "But from reading the post, I could see she'd made some mistakes."

Kern left a comment on the blog explaining that the yeast had to be fresh and that using a dough hook was not optional.

Andersen thinks truly impossible projects should include disclaimers - she had six submissions for the same dried strawberries.

"It's become my personal cause to show that people need to stop making these impossible dried strawberries," she laughed. "If you zoom in, those are candied strawberries coming out of the oven! There are probably people who tried those dried strawberries and then felt pretty inadequate."

As the site becomes more popular, Andersen, who now lives in Fremont, has become more discerning about what exactly constitutes a fail - the project or just the execution. A recent controversial entry she posted was on molded crayons - break up crayon pieces, melt them and bake them.

"It's very easy, but one woman messed up Celsius and Fahrenheit, and the whole thing exploded," Andersen said. "So maybe that wasn't quite a failure of the recipe, but the image was too crazy not to post. Crayon exploded everywhere."